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I think a distinction needs to be made between conspiracies where the mere knowledge of the conspiracies existence is secret, versus ones where specific details are secret. Everyone knows that Coca Cola and KFC exist, and have spice blends, and that those spice blends are secret. The existence of the spices have not been successfully hidden, and in fact many (most?) of the individual spices are known, but their exact combination and proportions are unknown, which means competitors can sort of imitate them, but not perfectly. We know the who, what, and why, just not the how.
Meanwhile, if you had a similar level of secrecy for something like political assassination, it would be over. If it leaked that X, Y, Z people were in a secret assassination club that killed people for political gain, but the exact details of who they had killed were secret, you could arrest and interrogate X,Y and Z, and then find out the details (and even if you never found out the details, you could still punish them for what you did know). Criminal conspiracies require not only that specific details remain secret, but that the existence of the conspiracy itself remains secret. Which is a lot harder to pull off.
Citation needed. Hop on over to to last week's transnational thread, and you'll see plenty of people engaging in conspiracy theories about Navalny's death. Here you have a secret assassination club, knowledge of who they killed, but the lack of ability to interrogate suspects, resulting in no hard evidence. This is the usual pattern with suspected conspiracies. For an example closer to home you can take Epstein's death, or the imprisonment of Assange.
These conspiracies may be a lot harder to pull off, but by no means impossible. I will say this "someone would have squealed" argument makes sense in some conspiracies - I think I originally heard it with regards to the moon landing, where you'd have to not only buy the silence of highly trained and disciplined specialists, but grunt technicians and janitors, and also hide it from hostile intelligence like the KGB (then again it's not like secret military bases don't exist), but through repetition and progressing laziness it got applied to all conspiracies. Now the idea that conspiracies are impossible has become an article of faith among people who pride themselves on their rationality and skepticism (though even that is rather selectively applied, again see: Navalny).
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